The introduction of an analytics monitoring platform to Brocade's fibre channel storage area network (SAN) offering will help organisations better realise enhanced returns on investment as well as reduce operating expenditure, said the networking solutions provider.

"To meet the demand of application and data growth, enterprises are deploying virtualised and cloud environments with the trade-offs of increased costs, complexity, and potential downtime," said Ong.

He said many enterprises today rely on guesswork and the experience of IT staff to maintain application Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and to identify and resolve issues across their compute, network, and storage resources.As the need increases to deliver 100 percent network availability, a lack of complete visibility into IT infrastructure can cause unnecessary application performance impact and downtime events as IT staff try to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks, configuration mistakes, said Ong.

Vast amounts of metrics

"The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform not only provides end-to-end visibility that was not available previously, but it also improves the ROI for storage infrastructures by providing in-depth, fabric-wide metrics.", he said.The platform has the ability to analyse an unprecedented 20,000 data flows and millions of IOPS (input/output operations per second) on a single system, said Ong.

He said the solution analyses "vast amounts of metrics from across the network, including network-connected devices, to uncover the often-subtle causes of infrastructure issues that diminish performance and availability. Performance history and trends are also tracked, enabling IT staff to proactively monitor and resolve issues, often before they occur."

As a result, organisations can better ensure predictable performance and operational stability for their IT infrastructures, said Ong.

"The ability to most efficiently optimise a SAN environment requires end-to-end visibility into performance statistics associated with all attached network devices," said Eric Burgener, research director, storage at IDC.

"Brocade's Analytics Monitoring Platform offers that in a centralised management platform that provides a comprehensive view of what is happening across the entire fabric, with the additional benefits of simple, rapid and non-intrusive deployment based on 'virtual tap' technology that is pre-integrated into all Brocade Gen 5 hardware," said Burgener. "Solutions like this will enable enterprises to get more out of their existing SANs, more reliably meet service level objectives, better maintain operational stability, and more accurately plan expansions."